Office 2013: Microsoft’s bid to win the future

Cloud, touch, social, and app streaming are the cornerstones of the next Office.

Storage, sharing, and “social”

Of course, you don’t get this kind of user mobility without cloud storage. And cloud storage is one of the key design points of Office 2013. While Office 2010 may have supported connecting to SkyDrive and to SharePoint services, those services are front and center in the consumer and business versions of Office 2013, respectively—which is why they play a prominent role in the subscription plans for Office as well. When you’re logged into Office with your personal or business Office account, Office applications save files to the cloud by default.

For consumers, that cloud storage is the SkyDrive service. Consumers who buy the Office subscription plan automatically get another 20 gigabytes of SkyDrive storage (for a total of 27 gigs). For business users connected to Office 365, there are additional choices, including a service called SkyDrive Pro, part of the new SharePoint service of Office 365. SkyDrive Pro behaves much like Google Drive, in that you can share files with specific people and control their level of access (edit or view). You can also create specific folders for work that are synced to your devices.

It’s fairly straightforward to set up a synced library from Office 365; there’s a “Sync” button right at the top right corner of every library page. Clicking it connects the page to a system tray applet for SkyDrive Pro, which sets up a local cache for Office to access the documents when the network isn’t available.

Enlarge/ The sync button in the new Office 365's SkyDrive Pro interface (the red arrow is not part of the Web app.) Click, and the SkyDrive Pro client app connects to the folder.

Enlarge/ The SkyDrive Pro background client picks up on the click on "Sync," and asks where you want the folder synchronized to on your PC or device.

Cloud storage also helps with collaboration on documents, and there are a number of features built into Office's apps to facilitate collaboration. You can directly share files from the Office applications via SkyDrive—an interface in each of the applications generates an e-mail message to a collaborator with a link to the shared document.

Enlarge/ The file sharing interface from within Office apps offers a number of options for sharing, including creating a collaboration URL for the file hosted on a Microsoft server or posting to SharePoint, sending it as an e-mail, or presenting it via a Web player. When Web-sharing, you can invite people directly from within the application, or create a URL to post for large numbers of people to get access.

Enlarge/ Once you've chosen where the files go, SkyDrive Pro invites you to watch the files come rolling in.

While you don’t get the sort of live co-editing that you get in Web-based applications (including the Web versions of Office apps), Office will at least tell you who’s in a document and when changes have been made. For example, in Word, the application alerts you when someone else is editing the document, and when updates to it are available—and allows you to merge those changes with your own (and steer clear of areas where changes are being made.

When someone else has a shared document open, Office alerts you. In Word, you can keep on editing; in Excel, it shows you the document in read-only.

Enlarge/ Word showing updates from another editor are available for a document. Clicking "Save" synchronizes the file with the changes made by the other editor, merging them with yours.

Enlarge/ After you've synced a co-edited document in Word, the changes made by the other author (or authors) since you started working on the document are highlighted in green, as this dialogue box helpfully points out.

The co-editing feature is one of the places where Office’s new sort-of-social features start to come into play. Microsoft has expanded the “people-awareness” of applications—in addition to letting you know who’s editing a document, or tracking who makes comments, the Office account information associated with each user allows for direct integration from the core Office document-editing apps with Outlook, Lync, and other services.

Enlarge/ Clicking on the name of another editor in a document brings up a contact card that includes their social network status and icons to contact them through Lync, or schedule a meeting or e-mail them through Outlook.

Some of this happens through Office’s Social Connector feature. Originally introduced as part of Outlook in Office 2010, the Social Connector draws information about contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live Messenger, Xing, and other social networking services, as well as from an Office 365 “team site” (the SharePoint cloud service). Hough said that the Social Connector API would be open, so that other social networking providers can build their own interfaces to Office.

Microsoft obviously has an interest in promoting social networking within enterprises, with its recent acquisition of Yammer. Chris Schneider, a senior communications manager in Microsoft’s Office division, said in response to a question of mine that Yammer will continue to be offered as a standalone service by Microsoft, but “over time, Yammer will offer more connections to Office 365, SharePoint, Dynamics and Skype.” While there’s no official word on a Yammer version of Social Connector for Office, one is certainly in the works.

That brings up another social element introduced in Office 365—the newsfeed. Part of the update to the Office 365 service launching along with Office 2013 is the addition of user profile pages, personal “newsfeeds” where users can post status messages, and the ability to “follow” people’s profiles as well as specific pages. When someone you follow within Office 365 posts a new update, or when changes are made to a SharePoint page you follow, an alert gets e-mailed to you.

That newsfeed information is surfaced within the individual Office client applications as well. When there’s someone editing a document you’re interested in, or someone has left a comment in a document, you can click on the person’s name and pull up a “People Card” that lets you see their newsfeed, instant message them or call them through Lync, or send them an e-mail. Other social-like features are supported directly in the documents themselves—for example, comments within documents are now threaded.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.